Minorities within a Minority: Teduray-Lambangian Women and the Quest for Peace in Mindanao, Philippines

The signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro, which guarantees the right to self-determination of the Bangsamoro people through the creation of an autonomous Bangsamoro political entity, hopes to bring the promise of peace in Mindanao to fruition. However, while it is aimed at addressing decades of discontent among the Moros, the peace process is yet to deal with issues that have plagued non-Moro indigenous people, among them the Teduray-Lambangian, who claim close to 300,000 hectares of land and foreshore areas within the proposed autonomous political entity. This paper explores how conceptions of land and space are attached to identity constructions, producing dominant narratives and silencing others. It looks at the socio- economic context of the conflict in Mindanao and how it has produced the dominant Bangsamoro identity. It also examines state and mainstream discourses on indigeneity and how Teduray-Lambangian women have navigated through these to bring attention to experiences of land dispossession and discrimination which have produced gendered experiences for the women in the tribe. Examining the intersections of indigeneity, territory and gender allows us to locate the role of Teduray-Lambangian women in the tribe’s struggle for the protection of their ancestral domain and their contributions to the peace process. Throughout the paper, the researcher refers to data gathered from qualitative interviews with women community leaders from the tribe. Reflections and analyses are informed by various theorizations on gender and intersectionality, indigeneity, and on space/place.